Celebrating life in the Catholic Church

Moral by proxy

Darwin Catholic has put up another thought-provoking post – about those who look back at history and account themselves virtuous for siding with those who chose good over evil.

Sometimes this happens very shortly after an event. In post-war France, it was often observed that if everyone who claimed to have been part of the resistance had actually been so, the occupation would not have lasted a month. Similarly, I recall reading a civil rights writer observe, “Every [African American] says he would have been a freedom rider. Most people just stayed home. Everyone says he would have marched with Martin Luther King, but people just used the water fountain they were told and watched it on TV.”

The fact of the matter is, identifying the right side of history is easy — indeed so easy that it’s easier if one doesn’t actually know much about history. So easy that there is virtually no moral action involved.

To be sure, choosing the wrong side of history can be a significant moral wrong. To support the Nazis or support slavery or support Stalin in this day and age shows a deeply twisted moral sense. But to oppose these three is so easy, and so obvious, from this point in history, that there is little to no virtue involved.

To congratulate oneself for admiring the right side of history is to assign oneself virtue one has not earned. Indeed, it is often more a sign of pride than of virtue. Without question, we should admire those in history who acted virtuously, but we should not consider ourselves to have performed any great virtue by doing so. Nor should we be quick to consider ourselves the superiors of those “ordinary people” in history who failed to rise to the standards of our heroes. We look at their actions with all of the clarity of distance, and none of the danger of immediacy.